


undir hyljandi húð

by meritmut



Series: your skin suits you best [2]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Folklore, Forests, Gen, Mythical Beings & Creatures, Skogsrå Rey
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-06
Updated: 2018-10-06
Packaged: 2019-07-27 03:52:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 723
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16210832
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/meritmut/pseuds/meritmut
Summary: Most mirrors are human things: you would never perceive her true shape in one.





	undir hyljandi húð

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kimaracretak](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kimaracretak/gifts).



> hulder rey, the hairy feral goblin woman we deserve

After dark the low-simmering heat of the day became unbearably close, and Rey slips out of the tunnels to wander for a while under the trees. She pauses for a moment on the threshold of that suffocating warren and draws in a grateful breath. She hates it under the hill. She hates the stuffy, claustrophobic darkness, she hates the smells and the echoes and the way things sound  _wrong_  bouncing off the man-made walls, lined in a stone that is not stone. She hates the way she feels like she is living in her own tomb.

The weight of that hatred falls from her shoulders as she leaves the tunnels behind.

It is a new pleasure, the freedom at day’s end to escape the underworld and roam beneath the stars, and in a life of scarce luxuries it is one she guards jealously.

Her feet sink into the sphagnum until it brushes the tufts of wiry hair crowning her toes. Rey sighs as the damp cool spreads through her—she wants that feeling everywhere. She wants the silence and the shivering cold. She wants to feel living things against her skin again.

There are places in the wood where the stars never shine, where moonless waters whisper and the rain comes dripping down into dark pools stirred by a wind that sweeps the cloying sweetness of leaf-rot into the air. Those places—they are nothing she has ever known, and maybe this is why they call to her.

Rey stands on the edge of the pond and takes her hair from its braid, a methodical unravelling until it hangs loose about her shoulders. Piece by piece she sheds the skin she had stitched for herself so she could pass as something she was not, the mask of an ordinary human girl giving way gradually to something else and when, finally, she stands naked in the dusk, she breathes freely for the first time in days.

There's no moon tonight: the dim radiance of the stars can't pierce the trees. Soon, even the hand she holds up in front of her face will be lost in the blue-black dark.

Just as well. She did not come here to be seen.

(Invisibility was a strange thing, she sometimes thought. It was different to want it.)

She doesn't need to see the water to feel it. Rey sucks in a breath when the cold hits her: it burns like prickling fire where it touches, goosebumps breaking out on her skin as the water sweeps over her feet; her knobbly, scarred ankles, her rounded calves and lean thighs—which like the rest of her are dusted with fine dark hair, that becomes coarse and dense over her groin and grows faint again where it leads up to her navel. Even in her nakedness she could have been ordinary if all you did was glance at her, and she has grown skilled at ensuring that was all anyone ever did.

Even her reflection wears a mask.

Her teeth are chattering by the time the water reaches her waist but she pushes on, further into the frigid pool where it runs deep enough to swallow her whole.

 

**

 

She has seen her full self reflected only a few times, but most mirrors are human things: you would never perceive her true shape in one.

In the mirror you can't see the stippled tufts of auburn hair on her back and shoulders; you cannot see the tail she keeps wrapped around her thigh or coiled at the base of her spine. You cannot see the yellow in her eyes or the scream that lodges like a white-hot coal in her throat, or the  _power_  that seethes under her skin.

In the mirror she is nearly human.

 

**

 

The waters rise over her head, filling her skull with the sonorous whispers of the deep. The blue noise drowns out everything else—everything but the subaqueous thunder of the blood in her ears and the steady tattoo of her heart against her ribs. It is close enough to the silence she craves that she lets herself sink into it, surrendering to the pull of the dark.

Closing her eyes, she feels the _thing_  inside her come loose.

The waters of the pool begin to bubble and burn as Rey opens her mouth and screams.

 


End file.
